Codepope's Development Hell

I was going through the drawers in the lab when I happened across a Kim Uno that I’d put together a long time ago. It’s an Arduino Nano emulating the 6502 at the heart of the Kim-1, one of the classic early microprocessor machines from the late 70s. The board is super bare bones, and with the arrival of a Flashforge Adventurer 3 it was time to get exercising the new printer to make the Kim Uno more finished and all boxed up.

So, what do you do with old Pi projects? I had a Pimoroni Keybow on the side and thanks to RedRobotics’ tiny Pico2Pi board, I had the chance to breathe life back into it by replacing the controller board. Drawing back the Keybow Back in the day, the original Keybow was an interesting little beastie. A 3x4 keyboard of clicky switches with RGB LEDs as a compact keyboard; add your own Raspberry Pi Zero underneath and use a bare metal Lua implementation to configure the keyboard to send codes.

The Dazzler boards have arrived in my Development Hell. These boards, from James Bowman’s Excamera, are a continuation of the Gameduino family of devices which strapped a GPU and a Touchscreen to an Arduino to make a more than functional, graphically rich hand held games device. With the Dazzler, James has taken the Gameduino-3X GPU and moved it to a standalone board which also has an FPGA programmed up to manage more of the work and generate an HDMI signal.

Well, there I was thinking Ghost isn’t really what this blog needs and I went for the whole “let’s move to something static”. Static sites are great and cheap to run and there’s some great generators and themes out there. I went with Hugo for a generator and Story for a theme and deployed it all through Netlify. So with all that done, we now have a much simpler blog, I have a fork of Story to work on and I’m planning on blogging here much more regularly; at least I should do as I’m having a bit of a working break at the moment.

Well, 2020 is coming to an end and boy, we didn’t see that coming. Well we did. So, changes had to be made… HackWimbledon has evolved into Makeroni which now is weekly online (Zoom) and every day (Discord). I’ve been making various things there. Lots of fun with 433Mhz doorbells and an M5 Atom to create a doorbell listener which flashes and triggers a push notification through the PushSafer service. More 3D Printing but still no designing yet (That’s a 2021 resolution right there).

So I’ve been having a little bit of a hack (at HackWimbledon) on the Adafruit Clue alpha and having some of Elecfreaks Joystick:bits to hand I thought I’d get them working together. The Joystick:bit has been replaced by a version 2. Apart from anything else, all the supporting code and libraries (what little there were) have been updated for the new Joystick:bit. Which is a pain as the original has the oddest buttons you’ve ever seen.

What should be a great machine on paper, the Udoo Bolt, isn’t. And its for the most ridiculous of reasons. Let’s rewind… Udoo do SBC (Single Board Computer) PCs and blend in an Arduino and a whole bunch of hackable IO. Great idea. The Udoo Bolt is another of these with an AMD Ryzen processor at its heart rather than the old Intel x86. Again, great idea. Signed up with Kickstarter and eventually, the device arrived in super stylish (if logic puzzle to assemble) metal case.

So, I’ve not been around on the blog, but things carry on…. Current project - Tetvaders PoC; Tetris and Space Invaders in one particle powered fun show - eventually want to put it onto LED panels Current irritation - The Beaglebone AI - lovely board but docs are sorely lacking and what docs there are tell you you need a heatsink or a fan. SBC design fail de jour, there’s too many new SBCs which need a fan.

Well I was hoping to go mobile with Ghost so I could blog anywhere but I hit a snag. Simply put, there is no mobile blogging app I can find for iOS so far. So plan B is blogging with the Android app for Ghost. No excuse now. So now I had better get writing about my rain rainbow device, my PiDP11/70 build and this BLE plant monitor… Oh and the new SQFMI Badgy which is up on the article pic.

So, I was looking for something to do at HackWimbledon today and as I’d just got my hands on the Hex Neopixel panels from M5Stack, I thought I’d see what I could get going. And down I fell into a hole which lead to playing with spreadsheets. Lets look at the device in question: Pretty neat eh. The demo code was easy enough to get going and it slaps a rainbow over all the pixels.